I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?
> I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?
I'm working two entry level jobs, and I have spent maybe upwards of 100B tokens in the last year? on a project which isn't more than 250,000 lines of code. I have done countless refactors and care a lot about the craft.
Performance is a consistent issue. Ive had to build a lot of optimization and benchmarking tools in order to keep things functional. Every couple of weeks I have to refactor everything to keep load times good. Both on the database side and on the lisp side. The models, by default, will happily build functions with 26 database calls or millions of recursive steps.
More frustrating, though, was probably the 3-4 weeks when i migrated the storage concept to "one big tree". This was an aesthetic thing that I later found out some of the old lisp machines also did. But - I didn't think about it initially when I built it. And switching things at that low level was difficult. There was a lot of legacy data stores along the way and programs were using the old store constantly. Very irritating. I still wonder if it would have been faster to just completely rebuild at that point.
An ambitious user could probably run it themselves and have it function, or I think I could run it as a managed service for somebody and have it be good, but the UX is still not really ready for primetime
I think it's like any other craft. Buildings and most furniture are built using mass produced lumber and machinery, but many people still enjoy doing woodworking by hand.
Yes, but it may be hard to justify the "experience of coding" from a commercial standpoint.
Casey Muratori had a take on a podcast that I liked comparing writing code vs. using an LLM to generate code to playing guitar by hand vs. playing digital music. Although it's arguably more efficient to play an mp3, people still enjoy the art of playing the guitar.
